EVALUATING AND USING AVAILABLE TECHNOLOGICAL RESOURCES FOR A LOW COST ONLINE MATHEMATICS REFRESHER PROGRAM

Over the last decade, the number and types of technological resources available have increased dramatically. These resources are of varying costs, quality, adaptability, and purpose. This presentation will focus on the specific technological resources used for an online low cost summer mathematics bridge, or refresher, program. The various constraints placed on available choices will be discussed as well as the benefits and deficits of the various resources used.

To understand some of the constraints, it is necessary to understand the purpose of the program. Incoming college students in the United States continue to struggle with adjusting to college level courses, particularly in mathematics. Recently, there have also been significant budgetary challenges for many public universities. With the pass rate for many first semester mathematics courses below fifty percent at our university, we were tasked with creating a low cost online learning environment that would increase the first semester pass rate.

There is a variety of adaptive and interactive technologies on the market that target the subject area of our project. However, many are expensive and require a significant financial commitment from our university, or from the individual participants, or both. These particular technologies were not feasible due to the financial constraints of both our participants and our university. In order to keep the costs low, existing online learning resources such as Khan Academy were ultimately used to implement the curriculum that had been designed for this program. While Khan Academy is “free forever”, it lacks instructor supports that are available in some of the costlier options. Therefore, a larger ongoing time commitment from the program administrators has been required over the lifetime of the program. We will address the strengths and weaknesses of this type of technology as well as how this affected the program.

In addition to online curriculum resources, online classroom environments were also required as well as technological resources that would facilitate communication between the participants and the online tutors and instructors. As part of this presentation, we will also discuss our rationale and constraints for choosing these types of technology.

Finally, the choice of an online program versus a more traditional in-person program will be discussed. The data collected over the last three years show that student success can be improved through a relatively low cost, technology dependent distance course. However, that does not mean that the amount of human investment has been lessened. While allowing the program to reach a more diverse population, the amount of hours invested in building and maintaining the program rival or exceed that of a traditional in-person course.